The EduBlogs Awards – ‘Edding in the wrong direction?
[Edited 8th December 2008 - see Gary Woodill's comment below]
So anyway I opened my Google Reader this morning only to find that there’s plenty of what the intelligence community call ‘chatter’ – apparently there’s doin’s-a-transpiring about the EduBlogs Awards.
Some of my favourite bloggers, Doug Johnson (Blue Skunk Blog), Tony Karrer (eLearning Technology) and Stephen Downes (Stephen’s Web) are discussing the EduBlogs Awards – and they’re not being complimentary.
Doug Johnson points out that (any) awards in the blogosphere are seen as an “extrinsic reward” for the author of a particular blog so honoured, and entirely separate from the intrinsic motivations most bloggers have for creating and maintaining their space on the Web. He posits the question: do blog awards actually have some value? I’ll come back to this.
Regarding the EduBlogs ‘Eddies,’ Stephen Downes notes that some awards seem to have up to twenty nominations per category and that the nominations system seems to be unnecessarily convoluted. Tony Karrer picks up this theme and expands it as he muses upon the merits of page rank, (Technorati-style) authority, and other social Web measures of ‘interestingness.’
Now I’m a (relative) newbie at this blogging business, and there wasn’t a snowball’s that The E-Learning Curve Blog was going to emerge as a nominee for an Eddie, so I have no axe to grind in this matter, but I really have to say that I recognised very few of the nominated blogs. I put it down to my ignorance of blogs in categories like Best Class Blog and so forth, but I didn’t recognise too many of the blogs in any of the categories.
But the blogosphere is a big place: so I had a look at some of the blogs just to see what they were about. And… well, they were alright – not my cup of tea I suppose. (I am aware that my view is one man’s outlook and you, dear reader, take it for that). It amazed me that none very few of what I would consider the ‘Top 50’ e-learning blogs received a mention: what’s more I suspect that this is the concern of very credible learning professionals like Messers Johnson, Downes and Karrer.
My conclusion? That the Eddies’ Nominees are like the voting in the last Eurovision Song Contest. Everyone is voting for their buddy, regardless of the quality, value, or merit of the material their blogs’ contain.
A wise man (Kent Brockman) once said: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll 
say it again – democracy just doesn’t work.”
So, have a good weekend, and don’t forget:
VOTE EARLY, VOTE OFTEN.
December 05 2008 02:22 pm | e-learning
One Response to “The EduBlogs Awards – ‘Edding in the wrong direction?”
Concerning EduBlogs’ Nominations, or How NOT to Win Friends… | The E-Learning Curve Blog on 10 Dec 2008 at 3:21 pm #
[...] this week, I posted on the topic of the EduBlogs’ nominations for 2008. I indicated my surprise at the lack of the blogs that I would consider to be deserving [...]